Scott Pruitt and the Whiny Crybaby Losers

Scott Pruitt, new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), wants a “red team/blue team debate” about global warming. That’s where two sides argue different opinions on some topic, and at its best it brings greater clarity about the issue. In this case, red is “The consensus of climate scientists is wrong,” blue is “The consensus is right.”

We’ve already had this debate, for over 100 years, right where it should take place: the scientific literature and scientific conferences. The red team lost. Big time. But they are sore losers, whiny little crybabies.

The whiny crybaby losers have a champion: Scott Pruitt. He doesn’t just want a “red team/blue team” debate, he wants one broadcast on TV. That kind of “debate” is bad for truth, good for lawyer-type rhetoric. It won’t matter who’s right or wrong, just who can be more charismatic and/or persuasive to the general public.

This charade will be nothing but a 3-ring circus. The only thing it will accomplish is to provide lots of 10-second soundbites to be endlessly repeated on Faux news.

How about a red team/blue team debate — on TV — to decide whether or not cigarettes cause cancer?

If Scott Pruitt and the rest of the Trump administration were in the pockets of big tobacco, that’s what we’d get. But they’re in the pockets of fossil fuel money — so this is what we get.

People like Pruitt know, that they have no skin in the game. I’d this kind of people had to exchange their properties and fortunes for those which will be affected first by sea level rise and the like, they’d argue differently.

In the longer run they have of course also skin on the game (if the world goes down, they go down as well), but the money they get balances out every worry they might have.

A proper scientific debate would involve one team presenting its theory and the other team a rival theory: oxygen vs phlogiston or Natural Selection vs. Lamarckian evolution. This will just be an attack on the established AGW theory, with its high probability of considerable harmful effects for us and a great many other species, with no rival theory on offer. “Lukewarmists” will make common cause with sky dragon slayers, with whom they have nothing in common where science is concerned, but merely a shared ideology.

I could get behind it if broadcasting would give it the full time it deserves — at least 200 or 300 hours. Otherwise, decision goes to the ad men. I always hear the truth whenever a news host says “I’m sorry, but we’ve run out of time”

For those of us who have been ‘debating’ with climate deniers online for many years now, we know exactly how this will go. Take temperature adjustments for example, without knowing why scientists adjust (change) data sets to better reflect the situation, it is easy for deniers to cast that in a sinister light. They call it ‘fudging’ the data. Once referred to that way, the honest scientists have to go into to enormous explanation to bring an audience of laypersons up to speed, and that just isn’t feasible in a ‘debate’ situation.
All that the deniers have to do is the tried and true Gish Gallop, and all nuance is immediately out the window. This is true even in a well moderated and formal debate situation, which I can assure you, this will not be.
It would take 1,000s of hours of testimony to present the complex web of multiple disciplines that go into climate science’s present understanding of AGW that is certainly above above the head of most people, to get them even to square one if they have already been previously bamboozled by the likes of FOX and Kochs.
This is a non-starter.

Rhetoric is not going to stop global warming. Pruitt may succeed in curbing support for climate research, but the warming wiil continue. The good news is that other governments aren’t as stupid as our current one is and climate research will continue in other countries.

The time to argue with morons and liars about the facts and truth of AGW has long elapsed.

Nevertheless, Pruitt deserves to have his trial. And so do all the folks denying climate science for personal profit.

But it needs to be at the International Criminal Court, and they need to be prosecuted for Crimes Against Humanity (CAH). The ICC has recently proposed new rules to include prosecution for environment-related CAH:

Much as I’d enjoy the schadenfreude of seeing each member of the Koch family pay damages for Koch-ogenic Global Warming out of his or her private cookie jar foundation, I’m skeptical the plaintiffs would ever see any of it. Yet supposing that bankrupting the Charles Koch Foundation were imaginable (although one easily imagines him putting up a fight), it still wouldn’t make CKGW fair, because both CK’s benefit and his victims were ours too.

That is, we – disproportionately, residents of the ‘developed world’ – are the ‘Anthro’ in ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’. Let they who incur no marginal climate-change cost in the pursuit of private happiness hold themselves blameless. AGW made the Kochs and a few other fossil-fuel producing families wealthy ‘beyond the dreams of avarice’ (now an obsolete expression), while the rest of us just stayed warm, watched TV, ran crosstown errands and enjoyed the other ramifying benefits of ‘cheap’ fossil fuels throughout our lives.

Concentration of benefit, concentration of fault? The costs to AGW’s 3rd party’ victims are the same. ‘Justice’ can never be done, either. Suppose I, having benefited as much by socializing my marginal AGW costs as anyone, were to give my life savings to the families of Filipinos killed by Typhoon Haiyan. I’d still have my family, you’d would still have your savings. And we’d both still have our lives and the benefits of membership in a materially prosperous society, purchased for us at seemingly random, open-ended prices by members of less prosperous societies who have enjoyed their own prosperity late and little.

Nor would my purely symbolic act of atonement restore atmospheric CO2 to 350 ppm or role the tides back from Kiribati. All I can do is ‘repent, and sin no more’. Everyone repents in his own way, and I’m putting all my effort into advocating a US Carbon Fee & Dividend with Border Adjustment. I command the tide to rise no higher.

I hope I don’t need to explain that by ‘seemingly random open-ended prices’, I’m referring to ‘natural’ disasters like:

“The strongest typhoon to make landfall on a major island in the western North Pacific Ocean” (http://doi.org/10.1002/2014GL060689). The geometry of Leyte Gulf, and certainly [OT] the economic geography of the Republika ng Pilipinas as well [for ‘twas ever thus], contributed to the >45,000 casualties; nevertheless “such super typhoons are expected to increase both in number and intensity as a result of global climate change”, and to track farther poleward;

The anthropogenically hellish heatwaves in South Asia that have cut short tens of thousand of impoverished unskilled laborers’ lives already in this century (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0145.1). “Without exception, all the heat-related events studied in this year’s report were found to have been made more intense or likely due to human-induced climate change”;

The loss of upscale houses to a flash flood in a place that’s never been flooded before, until AGW made ordinarily-heavy rainfall extraordinary (http://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-897-2017: read it yourself).

And before going further: The causal links from AGW to recent human casualties in at least the tens of thousands are sufficiently demonstrated that a claim there are none is extraordinary. Asking whether a particular storm was ‘caused’ by AGW is like asking which cigarette caused the lung cancer that killed you; meanwhile, you and 6000 ‘unlucky’, mostly poor Tacloban residents are still dead.

Pruitt is a lawyer, and his job is to do what it takes (within the law) to win for his client. As head of the EPA, his client should be the American people, but instead it is the fossil fuel industry. He has no interest in the right of wrong of his client’s case, his only interest is in winning. Therefore he will argue starting from the position he wants (a win for his client) and will use sophistry and deceit to, at the very least, cast doubt on his opponent’s position. The public as a whole is not trained to withstand that kind of onslaught, and he knows it.

It would need to be a long debate. The denialists would get 2 sentences in, and then the climate scientists would need 2 hours to demolish the opening lies. The moderator would have to be mighty tough, as he’d keep having to say to the denialists, “No, we’ve discussed this already and you are wrong. Just saying it again doesn’t suddenly make it right. You are forbidden to bring up this point again”.

“Revenge is the unworthiest of causes. How about we focus on fixing the problem?”

The problem is that the wealthy and deniers are out for revenge. Revence against leftists, “eco-loons” and Obama for being black. The problem is that the ones arguing against reality have no repercussions for their ignorance or intransigence.The fix to that is to MAKE them suffer repercussions for their ignorance or intransigence. At that point they’ll WANT to actually investigate the problem and find out how defensible their denial is, because failing to have a REALLY solid case for their refusal of real life will cost them specifically and personally.

Sans that, there is no way to fix any problem with the climate, because that isn’t still, the problem. By the time the climate is the problem, it will be too late to do anything other than “abandon ship” where we are ALL in the shitter. At the moment, the problem is the lack of consequences for denial.